Covington Catholic versus CNN

      Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, on behalf of student Nicholas Sandmann, is suing CNN and the Washington Post for defamation, saying they "falsely conveyed that he was the face of an unruly mob confronting a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial in January."  The lawsuits are seeking $275 million and $250 million, respectively.  Read about it here.

      Without a doubt, these news media outlets totally screwed up.  Without a shred of fact-checking or even asking some basic questions, they jumped to conclusions based on a single photograph, and turned this teenage boy and his school into Public Enemy Number One.  The news media absolutely deserves to be dragged thru the mud on this one.  Worse, they have only given President Trump and his followers more fuel to fire their "fake news" claims.

      The incident is very similar to the infamous Duke lacrosse case of 2006, where a group of college athletes were falsely accused of a rape crime, and the news media and the public jumped to conclusions before all the facts were in. 

      However, there is another aspect to this case that no one (that I am aware of) has brought up:

      In the photo, Sandmann is wearing a red MAGA (Make America Great Again) hat - the iconic symbol of President Donald Trump and everything that he represents.  Regardless of your personal feelings about Trump, the undisputable fact is that he is a very controversial and polarizing figure.  You may hate him or you may love him, but I challenge you to find anyone with a middle-of-the-road or apathetic opinion of him.

      So if you wear a MAGA hat in public, you are pretty much inviting controversy and strong emotions.  Meanwhile, it's no secret that Trump and the mainstream media are bitter enemies.  So put some MAGA-hat-wearers, photographers, and news reporters in the same place, mix thoroughly, and you got you a guaranteed recipe for a fight.  It's no different than if people show up in public wearing a Nazi swastika.  Or a "Black Lives Matter" t-shirt.   

      If Sandmann and his friends just wanted to show up at the event as neutral observers, my advice would be:  ditch the MAGA hats first.  No, this does not excuse CNN for sloppy journalism.  But the political hats surely didn't help matters.

     And then there are the lawsuits.  If both are successful, we're talking about over a half of million dollars for Sandmann's family and their lawyers.  Wow - I could retire quite comfortably on a fraction of that amount.  Without a doubt, America's civil justice system has provided a government-backed vessel for anybody who claims their feelings have been hurt - and their lawyers - to extort mountains of cash from deep-pocketed businesses.  (A great topic for a future blog article!)

      Yes, CNN needs a serious kick in the posterior.  But $275 MILLION?  It's enough to make one suspect that it was all an elaborate scheme plotted by the school and the kids' parents.